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International Relations Program

International Relations Faculty & Staff

The International Relations faculty is made up of professors from the Anthropology, Economics, History, Political Science, and Modern & Foreign Languages & Literatures. Learn more about some of our faculty below or visit the contributing department websites for more information.

Program Director

Dexter Boniface, Ph.D.

Dexter Boniface, Ph.D.

Professor of Political Science

Dr. Boniface is Professor of Political Science and holds the Weddell Chair of the Americas at Rollins. Dexter was a visiting fellow at the Center for Inter-American Studies and Programs at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City in 2009-2010. He is co-editor of the book Promoting Democracy in the Americas (Johns Hopkins, 2007) and the author of numerous articles in journals such as Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, and Global Governance.

International Relations Faculty

Benjamin Balak, Ph.D.

Benjamin Balak, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Economics

Research interests: History of economic thought, economic history, methodology, philosophy and ethics, comparative economic systems and cultures, and economic rhetoric.

Shan-Estelle Brown, Ph.D.

Shan-Estelle Brown, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Specializations: Medical anthropology, patient-provider relationship, health disparities, chronic illness, self-treatment, acceptability of treatments, global health, HIV, addiction, sickle cell disease, healthcare innovation technology, healthcare user experience (UX)

Dan Chong, Ph.D.

Dan Chong, Ph.D.

Professor of Political Science

Dr. Dan Chong ​teaches courses in international human rights, global poverty, and peace and conflict resolution.  He has led international field study courses focused on human rights and poverty to Guatemala, South Africa, Tanzania, and the Thai-Burma border. His first book, Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), analyzes the methods that NGOs use to advocate for rights to food, housing, and health care. He has also contributed to journals such as Development and Change, Human Rights Review, and Global Environmental Politics. His Debating Human Rights (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014), ​is an undergraduate textbook that examines major controversies in the field of human rights. He is currently working on an undergraduate textbook on ​global development for Lynne Rienner Publishers.  He also serves as the faculty advisor for the Amnesty International student club ​and as the Program Director for the Social Innovation major at Rollins.
Rosana Diaz-Zambrano, Ph.D.

Rosana Diaz-Zambrano, Ph.D.

Professor of Spanish

Trained in Comparative Literature, Dr. Díaz Zambrana focused her studies on Modern Latin American Literature, more particularly, on contemporary Brazilian and Southern Cone narratives. Before coming to Rollins, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has presented papers in national and international conferences on memory, exile and the notions of home in contemporary authors. She has published numerous articles in a wide range of academic journals, and she is the author of three cinema anthologies, Cinema paraíso: Representaciones e imágenes audiovisuales en el Caribe hispano (2012), Horrofílmico: Aproximaciones al cine de terror en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (2014), and Terra Zombi: El fenómeno transnacional de los muerto vivientes (2016). At Rollins she teaches courses on Latin American film and culture, gender and race relations, fictions of fear, and literary masterworks.

Hannah Ewing, Ph.D.

Hannah Ewing, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of History

Areas of Specialization: Byzantine Empire, ancient and medieval Mediterranean, and the history of monastic reform.
Mike Gunter, Ph.D.

Mike Gunter, Ph.D.

Professor of Political Science

Michael Gunter, Jr., Ph.D. is a Cornell Distinguished Faculty and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow at Rollins College where he chairs the Department of Political Science and serves as the college’s NCAA Faculty Athletic Representative. A former Fulbright Scholar for the US State Department at Univerzita Komenského in the Slovak Republic, and a veteran traveler across all seven continents, Gunter writes and speaks about climate change politics, ecotourism, and all things sustainable development. His work has appeared in/on Inside Higher Ed, NPR, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Books include: Climate Travels: How Ecotourism Changes Mindsets and Motivates Action (forthcoming with Columbia University Press in April 2023), Tales of an Eco-tourist: What Travel to Wild Places Can Teach Us about Climate Change (SUNY, 2018), and Building the Next Ark: How NGOs Work to Protect Biodiversity (Dartmouth, 2004/2006). His literary agent is Jane Dystel of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret LLC. More information on Dr. Gunter can be found here.

Ashley Kistler, Ph.D.

Ashley Kistler, Ph.D.

Professor of Anthropology

Specializations: Cultural and linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerica, the Maya, economic anthropology, kinship, gender, collaborative ethnography, Latin American and Caribbean courses

Philip Kozel, Ph.D.

Philip Kozel, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Economics

Research interests: Property rights in general and intellectual property in particular, Economic theory, Economic history, and Marxian economics.

Rachel Newcomb, Ph.D.

Rachel Newcomb, Ph.D.

Professor of Anthropology

Specializations: Cultural and applied/public anthropology, Middle East and North Africa, gender, Islam, modernity, globalization, and identity

Alberto Prieto-Calixto, Ph.D.

Alberto Prieto-Calixto, Ph.D.

Professor of Spanish

Dr. Prieto-Calixto’s main areas of research include Golden Age, Colonial and Asturian studies. In addition to numerous articles and presentations on literature, film, culture, history, immigration and pedagogy, he has published a book about the theme of captivity during the XVI-XVII centuries in the Hispanic world, Héroes, prisioneros y renegados. El cautiverio en la narrativa hispánica de los siglos XVI y XVII (2009). His current research projects include a book about the Asturian immigration to the US, a study about Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and a book project on the presence of jai alai in the US. Professor Prieto-Calixto is Director-in-Residence of Verano Español (Rollins’s Summer program in Spain).

Mari L. Robertson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Economics

Research interests: Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy, Monetary Policy, Financial Institutions and Credit, Mortgage Lending.

Joshua Savala, Ph.D.

Joshua Savala, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of History

Areas of Specialization: Modern Latin America, Peru, Chile, labor and working-class history, oceans in history, social movements

Claire Strom, Ph.D.

Claire Strom, Ph.D.

Rapetti-Trunzo Professor of History

Areas of Specialization: Agricultural history, the American South, and the progressive era.

Patricia Tome, Ph.D.

Patricia Tome, Ph.D.

Professor of Spanish

After completing her bachelor's degree, Prof. Tomé worked as a journalist at Univisión, a Spanish-language TV network in New York. During her completion of her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Kansas, she was able to participate in programs teaching at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Oklahoma City Community College, and Instituto de Línguas in Vitória (Brazil). She has coauthored three cinema anthologies, Cinema paraíso: Representaciones e imágenes audiovisuales en el Caribe hispano (2010), Horrofílmico: Aproximaciones al cine de terror en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (2012), La gran pantalla dominicana: Miradas críticas al cine actual (2017). Her teaching interests include language acquisition, 20th and 21st century Latin American Literature, Cuban and Cuban American literatures and film, and modern Latin American and Peninsular drama.  

Martina Vidovic, Ph.D.

Martina Vidovic, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Economics

Professor Vidovic’s areas of interest are applied microeconomics, econometrics, environmental economics, and health economics.

Anca M. Voicu, Ph.D.

Anca M. Voicu, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics

Professor Voicu's areas of interest include international economics, European emerging markets, genetic algorithms applied to trade modeling, and evolutionary economics.

Yusheng Yao, Ph.D.

Yusheng Yao, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Areas of Specialization: Twentieth century China, modern education reform and rural reconstruction